Draft material to appear in Getting Pregnant When You Thought You Couldn't (Spring, 2001)

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Pointer 1: Educate Yourself About Infertility

            Familiarize yourself with the nature and use of diagnostic tests, procedures and medications typical in infertility treatment.  You need to understand what's happening to you.  Most adults think they already know how to make babies.  For infertile couples, making babies demands knowledge far beyond what the average person knows.  There is much to learn but not so much as to be daunting.  Learn about basal body thermometers, ovulation kits, laparoscopies and infertility drugs.  These topics are detailed in later chapters.

            Make all the important infertility terms part of your vocabulary.  Let the glossary at the end of this book be your guide.  The glossary includes explanations of the alphabet soup of high-tech infertility treatment:, IVF, ICSI, TESA, MESA, PCT, HSG, IUI.  It also covers procedures that sound more akin to construction or animal husbandry than to the lexicon of human medical care: cryopreservation, egg retrieval, assisted hatching, embryo transfer.  Other terms, such as luteal phase defect, endometrial biopsy, sperm morphology, varicocelectomy and anticardiolipin antibodies sound ominous but are less frightening when you know their meaning.  Couples who are successful arm themselves with as much information as possible so they can feel confident, make informed decisions, and converse fruitfully with their physicians.

             Even acquiring just some basic infertility information can put you on the road to further discovery.  The audience at a regional infertility conference sponsored by the education and advocacy-oriented RESOLVE Inc., for example, was well-educated about infertility.  Members of the audience were not shy about asking the speaker, Dr. Jonathan Scher, author of Preventing Miscarriage[i], many complex and detailed questions during his address, titled "Pregnancy after Infertility."  Dr. Scher appeared delighted by his audience's familiarity with his subject matter, and it gave him the impetus to include important details about advanced treatments for infertility and miscarriage -- giving the audience a very medically oriented and cutting-edge talk.

            Like Dr. Scher's audience, you, too, can gain the respect of doctors and acquire state-of-the-art information.  Your physician is apt to share more sophisticated insights with you if you are able to demonstrate a deeper-than-average understanding of infertility.  Your infertility knowledge can help you regain the control you lost when you learned that you couldn't get pregnant when you wanted to.  This knowledge also can dispel some myths and provide you with answers you need about the medical options that have become widely available only in the last decade.

            We encourage you to be a voracious reader.  Read everything written about infertility in books, magazines, newspapers and on the Internet.  You'll probably be surprised at the huge volume of information out there.  Add to your rapidly expanding knowledge by focusing on the chapters in Getting Pregnant When You Thought You Couldn't that explain and describe diagnosis and treatment.  Also, watch for talk shows and news programs both on broadcast television and on web sites (such as MSNBC.com or CNN.com) with infertility segments.  Remember, you don't have to go to medical school to understand what's happening to you.

            Others can help you too.  Talk to everybody you know who has experienced infertility.  One way to meet these individuals is to join RESOLVE, Inc., founded by Barbara Eck Menning[ii] in 1973.  Through RESOLVE, you can join a support group in your area or call a hot line.  RESOLVE meetings, besides providing emotional support, give members opportunities to trade medical information (How should you prepare for an endometrial biopsy?), practical information (Where do you stick the needle in a Humegon injection so that it hurts less?), and even financial information (What's the best way to submit an insurance claim to receive the optimum reimbursement?)  By educating yourself, you'll not only feel calmer, but you'll also increase your chances of getting pregnant when you though you couldn't.